THE
Hungarian uprising of 1956 was a spontaneous
rebellion by a nation against the rule from
Moscow - against the faceless, indifferent,
incompetent functionaries (the 'funkies'
David Irving calls them, adapting the
Hungarian word funkcionáriusók)
who in little more than a decade had turned
their country into a pit of Marxist misery. But
this fluttering of a national spirit was brief:
the Soviet Union crushed the uprising with a
brutality that shocked the western world.

The full story has never
before been told. David Irving's search for
material and documents took him to the great
cities of the northern hemisphere. He questioned
survivors in Moscow, Munich, Geneva, Paris,
London, New York, Verona, Rome and Madrid - he
obtained clearance of previously un-obtainable
records in Washington relating to the role of
the CIA, Radio Free Europe, and United States
diplomacy. In Kansas he worked through the
records of Eisenhower, American president
at the time. In Toronto he found and interviewed
Budapest's police chief, who had been recently
amnestied from life imprisonment by the
Hungarians.

Irving was officially
permitted to visit Budapest several times. He
traced and talked with eye-witnesses and
survivors there and obtained new documents and
photographs from them. He questioned the men who
had been kidnapped, exiled, imprisoned and put
on trial with the Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, who
was sentenced to death, as well as members of
Nagy's family.

It is Irving's assessment of
Imre Nagy that will, perhaps, raise
eyebrows, as well as his discovery among
official records of evidence that anti-Semitism
was one of the motors of the popular discontent.
He has made use of hundreds of interrogation
reports prepared at the time by American
agencies, and supports this material with the
diaries of diplomats and western journalists who
went into Hungary.

The result is a compelling
autopsy of a failed rebellion. Irving offers
views from inside the council chambers of the
powerful as well as from street level. The
rebels are given names, personalities and
profiles thanks to the detailed records of the
American psychiatrists who saw them. It is a
book with a cast of ten million, a study that
counterpoints concrete examples with humour as
David Irving shows just how a rebellious urge
could erupt from within a nation.

WHAT
THE PAPERS SAID --

.
. . a forthright journalistic profile of the
1956 anti-Russian Hungarian
revolt. . . A vivid but lurid,
exclamatory book that will further enrage
professional historians. -- The Sunday
Express

The book's ... achievement: the piecing together
of an astoundingly detailed account, almost
shot-by-shot, of the street fighting in central
Budapest from the first phase on 23 October to
the final Soviet counter-offensive in the early
hours of 4 November. . . A work which must have
taken years to write and research. -- The
Observer

The result is a narrative which is
extraordinarily powerful, indeed compelling. Its
first merit is that it makes the street fighting
clear . . . the radio station, the headquarters
of the secret police, the Kilián barracks
. . . . The great merit of Irving's book is that
it has a sense of perspective. --- New
Society

David Irving . . . is a marvellous example of
that new breed of right-wing
propagandist-cum-historian . . . Respectable
historians such as A.J.P. Taylor have praised
Irving as a 'patient researcher of unrivalled
industry and success.' Irving is obviously
envied by his colleagues for his ability to win
the confidence of retired Nazi officials who
provided him with the diaries and other Hitler
memorabilia necessary for his revisionist
scoops. Irving is, after all, the first Western
historian chosen by the Budapest regime to be
given access to material on the 1956 revolution.
-- New Statesman

above:
Toronto, March 1979: David Irving (left)
interviews Sándor Kopácsi, police
chief of Budapest at the time of the
uprising

below:
Moscow, April 1978: David Irving with
General Batov, commander of the Russian troops
who crushed the uprising in Budapest